When I First Met My Husband, He Was My Student

After we started dating, I tried to come up with the perfect ambiguous answer to the question of how my now-husband and I met. Not a lie, exactly, but something vague enough to avoid the startled, slow-blink stare or the pressing silence that usually followed my scandalous explanation.

Even now, joining a few colleagues for drinks or grabbing coffee with another mom from my daughter's preschool has never felt like the most opportune moment to volunteer how my husband and I started our relationship.

No matter how skilled I've become at affecting nonchalance, someone's good-natured curiosity always turns my brush-off into a treasure hunt. A barrage of follow-up questions grow increasingly pointed, drilling down to my closely-guarded truth. This jumbled version of our story is always more incoherent than the one I was trying to avoid sharing in the first place.

I met Kevin during the fall quarter of my first year teaching college. I was four months out of graduate school, four months semi-settled into a new apartment in an unfamiliar city in the Midwest. I was 600 miles from my family and friends back east where I'd grown up and gone to college — and a year into a marriage with a man who was rapidly deteriorating into less and less of the version of himself he'd carefully practiced before our wedding. His anger had grown so explosive and erratic that sometimes while crossing the street, I'd be horrified to catch some part of myself wishing I'd get hit by a car.

Most nights I made excuses to sleep out on the couch, and I feigned cheer whenever I called home to talk to my dad. Relief came as a twice weekly drive to a tiny campus where I taught Developmental English.

Kevin sat in the back row by the door. He had an easy confidence, friendly, and talkative but unafraid to challenge others in discussion. He was clearly bright but also clearly bored, back in school after a long hiatus because of career gatekeeping. A voracious consumer of news and commentary, he started coming early to campus to debate politics with me while I copied grammar handouts. We didn't agree on much at first, but he listened with an earnestness and open-mindedness I'd almost forgotten I was deserving of.

The term ended after 12 sessions, but once a week Kevin still showed up in the open doorway of the teacher's lounge, filling the frame with shoulders broadened by years of baseball, watching while I prepped for class. We're the same age — our birthdays just three months apart — and it was becoming strange to reconcile how easily we engaged as peers with the fact that whenever Kevin passed me in the hall, he addressed me as Miss Clodfelter.

Through the winter, I noticed his rhetorical strategy evolving; he'd show up armed with more and better information to argue his points for whatever happened to be dominating the news. I started to hear a certain energy in his voice that sometimes made me forget about the reading quiz I was supposed to be writing. He was funny, his humor sharp and well-timed, and I often laughed more in the half-hour I stood at that copy machine than I did all week in my apartment, where I was learning to brace myself each time I spoke for what reaction might follow.

In the spring, friends of my then-husband finally started to voice their concerns, and I saw with clarity for the first time that I was in real trouble. I packed a bag and left for a few weeks. When I came back, it was to initiate a divorce.

One afternoon not long after that, Kevin strolled into the empty classroom where I sat grading papers and, like it was no big deal, asked if I felt like grabbing a beer with him sometime soon. I heard "yes" come out of my mouth before I'd even finished processing the question. My classmates and I had gone out for drinks plenty of times with our own professors, I reasoned. But once he left, I found that I was having to reread the same paragraphs three or four times over, my body buzzy. Just friends, I insisted.

That beer turned out to be the easiest three hours I'd spent with another person in the entire year since I'd first moved to town. And even though I wasn't looking, even though the timing was terrifying, even though when Kevin and I first met he was introducing himself from behind a desk in my classroom, I would have been a fool to say no the next time he asked, or the time after that, or the time after that.

I've stopped hesitating when people ask how my husband and I met. I turn toward them now instead, closing the space between us. I smile and lean forward, like I have a secret, before warning them to settle in, because it's sort of a complicated story.

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